14.04 Look and Feel: many items are VERY faint

[John Hupp]

With 14.04 newly installed on a machine with a P4 @ 1.6 GHz, 500 MB, an 
NVIDIA Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 400] VGA controller, and a CRT 
monitor (I know), I find that certain items in the interface are VERY 
faint.

Perhaps someone can help me pin down a proper description and I'll be 
able to customize my way out of the problem.

Some instances:

In Synaptic, the contents of the left-pane package categories and the 
right-pane package list are both faintest-dark text on white 
background.  (The lower-right description pane is fine.)

In AbiWord, in its menu bars, when a menu item is selected by hovering 
over it, many but not all of such items become faint-green text on a 
white background.

I see a variant of the above in the Start menu, where some items when 
selected become faint-green text.  The background is light-blue on the 
upper half of the background bar, and white/light-gray on the bottom 
half of the background bar.  (I tried to get a screen shot of that just 
now, but Print Screen did not create a file in my home folder nor copy 
anything to the clipboard.)

In PCManFM, many but not all file names, when selected, become 
light-green text on a white background.  In Details View, the other 
fields (Description, etc) may or may not do likewise.

In some cases the behavior is seen when an item is selected but does not 
have focus.

-----------------------------------

Perhaps a separate question, but I'll start with it here: On this 
lower-resource machine, I found that PCManFM, in the default view, would 
show all file names but only a certain number of icons -- unless I 
dragged the pointer over them, at which point the icons appear.

And a workaround question: This is so disconcerting that I have been 
changing folders to Details View and checking View: Preserve this 
Folder's Settings.  Unless/until the problem is solved, how can I make 
Details View the global default?